My friend Farnoosh Torabi forwarded a great testimonial from a mom who was trying to find a way to introduce allowance to her 8 year old daughter. Here’s how she tackled it using our Money Savvy Pig bank – and how it inspired her daughter. Enjoy!

My daughter is 8 and keeps asking about allowance but we have not seemed to have really gotten serious about it. I looked around for apps and didn’t find anything I liked that well, she doesn’t have personal electronic devices yet so I didn’t really have a desire to connect her to somehow electronically track a cash balance or something. So we went old school with something that’s been on my radar before that’s a recommended tool for teaching kids about money management (Money Savvy Pig – Pink) I told her this morning we would give her $8 per week and she can decide how to allocate it in this bank, but that on the flip side, we were done buying her things. She was ecstatic, like she’s won some prize or something!

So in this one day:
– she ran a lemonade stand, with limited supervision and made $11.50
– spent $4 at the store same day on sour patch gum, gummy worms and Chapstick. I had to choke down her purchase as it’s the kind of thing I just always tell her no about. She has so much Chapstick/lip gloss I can’t even express the nonsense. This part was hard.
– we talked about things like sales tax, what investing is, banking hours, and how much many different things cost.
– she made herself a vanilla milk at home after realizing she wouldn’t want to spend $2.50 on that herself.
– price checked gold and silver earrings at the department store (seriously)

It is hard to let her choose to buy things that seem wasteful to me, but I guess that’s part of the journey too.

About Susan

A sought-after speaker for financial institutions, state regulatory agencies, trade associations, leadership conferences and schools, she is the creator of the Money Savvy Pig piggy bank-- the centerpiece of the Money Savvy Kids Basic Personal Finance Curriculum.